A key focus of this blog is the history of Jacksons in Ireland. I am specially curious about those who may be related to Sir Thomas Jackson (1841-1915). His life is key to understanding how a dozen or so young men, sons of Irish tenant farmers, shaped the future of international banking in the Far East in the late 1800s. I also use this blog as a place for playful posts: book and restaurant reviews, recipes, and events in my life. WARNING: Note the date of each post. Some may be outdated.

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Sunday, April 29, 2012

I keep trying to imagine, and by this I mean to fully
imagine - with smells, sounds, sights and the very feel of it - what life must
have been like for the young Thomas Jackson born in 1841, the man who became an
eminent banker in Hong Kong.

Who did he run into in his walks around Creggan Parish
where he grew up? Who visited his parent’s house and farm? How did they get
there – walking, horseback, or in a horse-pulled cart? Who did his parents owe
money to, and why? How did life work for a family with a Church of Ireland
father and a Presbyterian mother – which people described then as a mixed
marriage.

There is little in the written record to flesh this out. One
of the most fertile sources is the church records. True, they may be dull as
dishwater, and in this case they are sadly incomplete, but with the advent of
the internet, hyperlinks, and the generosity of strangers, it is possible to
tease out an amazing amount of information. That is, if you can afford to put
in the time in the first place.

Interior of Creggan Church. Sir Thomas Jackson Memorial window is at the front.

I have made several trips to the Creggan Parish church, and
I hope to make another a year from now. Thomas Jackson’s father’s family had
belonged to this church for at least four generations. It is a small Church of
Ireland church in a region where most were Catholic. Most Sundays in Thomas’
time, the pews supported the posteriors of only a few dozen souls.His mother also took the children to the Presbyterian Church at Freeduff.

My husband was part of a similar rural congregation in
Rosedale, near Agassiz in BC. His Mennonite family emigrated from Germany in
1951 as indentured farmers, and had yet to learn English. Everyone in the congregation
was related to him. As a child, he knew full well that it was one thing to have
the eyes of God on you at all times, it was quite another matter to have the
eyes of this congregation. They knew your misdeeds right down to the last jelly
bean. They also knew of your accomplishments, although it was usually the
darkness that their collective eyes were drawn to.

A century earlier, when young Thomas scampered around the
graveyard after prayers, as he no doubt did, one of the best hiding places was inside
the enclosure where the Johnstons were buried, a stone wall that abutted the
railed enclosure of generations of Jacksons.I do not know whether the choice of a railed versus stone is meaningful,
but the location of these two families, cheek by jowl, is. They had arrived in
the region about the same time, had leased and bought land, often one from the
other, and had intermarried. The difference was the arc of their financial
success.

Thomas’ g-g-g-grandfather was the one who had lost his
earlier family lands, probably in Carlow or Wicklow, in a card game. His descendants
were equally unlucky, although not noticeably at the card table. The men had a
habit of dying while their children were young, leaving widows to run the farm.
The Johnston families did not suffer this fate on a regular basis, and as
result became well entrenched and well financed landlords. The grave enclosures
of these two families, side by side, amount to a familiar tale of rural life.
One family prospers; another fails. Hard work only takes you so far.

To get to this church, young Thomas walked over a
bridge that spanned the Creggan River just behind the church. The original wooden bridge
had been built by his great-grandfather, David Jackson, one of these Jackson
ancestors who had died an untimely death. Back then, church tithes funded a mix
of purposes that today are more usually the natural turf of a property owner, or
else some level of local government. Back then, the wardens of Creggan Parish
managed a range of public improvements, including this bridge which like many
contracts today, went over budget. We know about this, thanks to the church
records. It is recorded that David Jackson agreed to build the wooden bridge
for £3, but in 1790, a year later, he came back cap in hand for a further £3.17.9.
Plus ça change, when it comes to
bridge contracts.

View of Creggan River from the bridge behind Creggan Church.

On my most recent foray into the Creggan Church records, I
recorded as many of the collateral names of people related to this Jackson
family as I could, hoping to build a more fully fleshed picture of their
interrelationships. I am sure that if I knew the half of it, young Thomas would
turn out to be related to virtually everyone that warmed the pews in his day,
but at least the names that I have noted so far is a start.

Fortunately, a few mysteries have also been solved by this
work. For starters, I had a hunch for quite some time, but couldn’t quite prove
it, that the COULTERs who lived at Mounthill, and then Shortstone were related
to the ones who lived at Silverbridge. Now, I have them neatly like ducks in a
row, and have posted a family tree that illustrates just how they are related.
There are still other clumps of COULTERs in Armagh and Louth who hail from
Dorsey and Annavackey, as well as Carnbeg, so there are still stones to be
unturned before we can be sure how all of them inter-relate. Even so, the similarities
of faith, geography, social class and naming patterns all amount to a pretty compelling
smoking gun.

I am particularly curious about the Carnbeg COULTERs,
although they probably did not attend Creggan Parish Church. One of them, Joseph
Arthur COULTER, a mere six years older than Thomas, had an amazing life – that is,
if the records written a few years after he died are to be believed.
Apparently, he accompanied Lady Franklin
on her last expedition for her husband Sir John Franklin. That trip was in
1857, and was commanded by Francis Leopold McClintock of Dundalk on a yacht
called The Fox. McClintock had a crew
of twenty-five on board, as well as seventeen Arctic veterans, and he names
them all in his 1908 version of the trip. Unfortunately, there is no mention of
this Joseph.

Another bit of Joseph Coulter’s life that also proves
allusive is that he supposedly served a stint as Deputy Governor of Vancouver
Island. You would think that if he did, then he would show up in the BC
Archives, but no cigar. My best bet when guessing which Lieutenant Governor he
may have served under would be Hugh Nelson (1887-1892). Nelson was born at Larne, Co. Antrim. Such
appointments usually had more than a whiff of patronage about them.

Sometimes even the most dogged researcher can be fairly
skilled as both hunter and gatherer and still emerge empty handed, at least in
the short run. This is where I really appreciate an approach to writing described
by Ursula K Le Guin. She has what she calls: The Carrier Theory of Fiction. You gather up all the bits that appeal
to you, just as a wise elder or a magpie might do, no matter whether they are
feathers or bits of bark, or records of events and people, and you tuck them
into a bag. If you are a medicine man or woman, or even a writer, the contents
of this carrier bag becomes over time ever more magical as a result of the proximity
of its contents. The whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.

I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of
the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold
things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a
particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

There is no reason that Le Guin’s notion couldn’t also be applied
to creative non-fiction. Personally, I like the way that it matches my own idiosyncratic
process of finding and collecting as I try to sneak up on the truth. Perhaps my
blog site and website are a digital equivalent of the traditional carrier bag,
and by sharing the contents, the power of the magic expands. It is with that notion
in mind that I often post absolutely chaotic pages such as Ruminations on early Creggan Church Records. The best that I can
call such pages is organized ignorance or
if I want to feel a bit more important, my
carrier bag.

In this latest piece, Ruminations
on early Creggan Church Records, I am trying to figure out the connections
between JACKSONs, MASONs, JOHNSTONs and JONES. The links that connect to this
pursuit are beneath.

I always appreciate hearing from others if they notice that I
am way out in left field, or at very least in need of correction. Heck, like a
small boy hiding amongst the gravestones, I also appreciate hearing when I have
done something right.

Speaking of mistakes, and with the life of young Thomas in mind, I wonder what he might have thought of the
stained glass window erected in his honour that has pride of place as the main
window in the church. It has him born at Urcher rather than where he was
actually born at Aughavilla, Carrigallen, Co. Leitrim. I can't be totally sure, but he was enough of a
rascal, I think it would make him laugh.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

I was out walking last Monday with the Sisters of Mercy,
which is what we call ourselves for reasons lost in the mists of time, when being
who I am, I bragged about the bread that I had made earlier in the day. Actually,
I was decidedly pleased with myself. I keep playing with this and that when I
make bread, even though my poor husband would prefer it if I stuck to something
that was closer to white, plain, and unadulterated. Ah, well. Occasionally, I
do just that.

This particular batch was a mix of spelt and kamut. I often
pronounce the latter with the EMphasis on the wrong sylLABLE. Old dogs, new
tricks. KAmut. KaMUT. It is a problem.

When it comes to baking for those with wheat allergies and
gluten intolerance, I am also learning that there is a difference, and that one
needs to check. Kamut or KaMUT only works for some people and not for others. Same
with spelt, which conveniently only has one syllable. Still, Since one of The
Sisters wanted the recipe for a family member with some level of challenge with
wheat, I decided the easiest way was to share it here.

Fresh out of the oven - before I went on my walk.

This recipe is only an approximation. Since I have been making bread for more than
forty years, I am actually rubbish when it comes to being really reliable about
exact measurements. Besides, when it comes to bread, going by how it looks
counts for more than exactitude. Humidity for one thing can throw exact
measurements into a cocked hat. When it comes to non-wheat breads, I find chia
seeds really help with the texture. The rest is all to be played with.

Add enough to make it look like thick mud, beat it for about ten minutes with a dough hook, then let it
rest for half an hour or however long you like - up to a couple of hours.

¼ c Chia seeds

½ c hot water

Soak the chia seeds in hot water while the above mud is
resting. Then add the gelatinous result to the mud, and beat it for a few
minutes.

1 T salt

1T sugar

1 T oil

Hemp hearts

Pumpkin seeds

1 egg

Add these ingredients to the mud. As for measuring seeds
and hemp hearts, I just toss in what I feel like, a handful maybe.

Spelt flour

Add to all of the above, ½ c at a time, until the dough
pulls away from the side of the mixer, but is not at all firm. Leave it
covered for at least an hour, up to 2 hours., Then turn it on to a floured
surface, and knead it - only until it isn’t too sticky, but isn’t dry. Plop it
into a greased cast iron pot that has a lid. Cover and leave for half an
hour, or longer it needed for it to double in size. Preheat oven to 425
F convection, pop the bread in the covered pot into the overn, and bake for 20 minutes.
Then remove the lid, and bake for another 20 minutes. Then turn out onto a cooling rack. Set yourself a challenge. Try
not to cut into it until it has cooled a bit

After the walk, sliced so you can see the texture.

After getting my heart rate up by walking with The Sisters
on our usual circuit, I returned home for lunch and dug into the aforementioned
bread. I slathered it with a thin skim of peanut butter, and a generous dollop
of my Port Wine Cranberry-Apricot Sauce, so you may as well have that recipe
too:

Port Wine Cranberry-Apricot
Sauce – great on bread, in plain yoghurt, or with turkey.

Ingredients

What I did

8 whole green cardamom pods

Crush them in a mortar & pestle, & discard skins

3 cups Port Wine

Add to cardamom, and bring to boil in a heavy bottomed
non-reactive pot.

1 cup sugar

1 cup apricot preserves

1 cup fresh lemon juice

½ cup honey

2 6-ounce package dried apricots, quartered

Add to above & cook for about 2 minutes.

3 - 12-ounce bag cranberries

Add to above and cook until the berries make a delightful
popping sound, and most of them look popped.

1 grated lemon peel from one lemon

Turn off the heat, and add to above.Put into glass jars, and preserve, or eat it all. Whatever.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Last summer, I posted a piece about the incredible veggies grown by my brother Struan and his wife Sara. As it so happens, I am still
enjoying last year’s garlic, and it is even still sweet and fragrant. The individual cloves have none
of that bitterness that has accompanied some of the garlic that over the years I have chopped,
minced, pressed or otherwise had my way with.

Struan in his glory

But to all good things there is a season. Looking back with
pleasure, and looking forward with hope, Struan & Sara are now planning to
sell this farm. Their longer term hope is to buy acreage about half that size. To
be honest, I haven’t a clue how they ever managed over the past several years to run
a horse barn, as well as to grow enough vegetables and raise enough chickens,
ducks and other fowl as well as sheep and such to feed their extended family
and friends. They did all this, and yet still had enough left over to earn thousands from their
veggie stand. You would think that they worked at the veggie growing full time, but no such
thing. Struan has always had a full time job. It is just that gardening is his
passion. Gotta love him.

I recall a decade and change ago when my husband and I sold our mountain top acreage and home in Mission,
after having built the house with our own hands and raising our children there. We
had put our heart and soul into that house as well as the land surrounding it, but there comes a time. Living on a
mountaintop with a quarter mile road to maintain by hand was fast losing its
appeal as we aged. Our hope when we listed it for sale was that whoever followed us would cherish it as
much as we had. Of course, there are no such guarantees in life.

In Struan & Sara’s case, I hope that that the serendipity
of the internet will connect them to someone who will love this land as much as they have. Perhaps,
given the less than six degrees of separation that is true in our digital age, a
horse-loving, farm-loving person might find the pictures that follow.
Perhaps they will then feel their heart jump into their mouth with an impulsive OMG!
– and then like any serious dreamer, they will find a way to make their next dream
come true. After all, where else can you find a property such as this farm and
stable within easy walking distance to local stores and restaurants?

Struan & Sara's house - but there is also a second house on the property as well

Exterior shot of the stable and barn. It has an indoor arena as well as 22 12'X12' stalls.

The indoor paddock is kept neat, and also has a watering system to keep the dust down.

This is taken from the roof of the barn before spring time greening up. The 1900 square foot greenhouse is off the the left behind their home, and the second house is barely visible, but is just right of the middle of the picture.

This is one of Sara's favourite pictures - a view of their outdoor paddock.

NOTE: Struan & Sara do have a realtor: Corrine Stones &Marc Goodwin. However, if someone buys this place as a result of my blogging on
about it, then I expect double my usual portion of garlic scapes. Just kidding.
Actually, my reward would be if everyone finds their dream. I am kind of a mutt
about things like that.

Being new to the study of Irish history, I can be counted on
to get much of it wrong. The tales of slaughter, first by people on one side of
the religious divide, and then by another, can be so riveting that it is easy
to lose sight of the progress being made beneath the radar. One such
development that I hadn’t clued into, before I read Jim’s book, was how civil society was developed in part
because of the need for more tools for managing the British Empire. England was
forced to wrestle with what to do with the issue of governing Ireland, while
Ireland had to deal with England’s powers over them.

Civil society can be a slippery concept, and like beauty, is
often in the eye of the beholder. It isn’t business, and it isn’t government,
and yet both would be hamstrung without it. I see it as a flexible kind of space
that business, government and citizens can all inhabit, and where they can all share
some degree of power. Some people refer to it as the third sector, an aggregate of institutions such as clubs, churches,
labour unions, NGOs, and advocacy groups. Some would also include educational
institutions, as well as an independent judiciary, and a free press. Although the
concept of civil society is not to be
confused with the concept of democracy,
it does create the kind of space that often saves democracy from itself.

It would be impossible to imagine life today if the only legal,
political and moral space we had to act in was a polarized combination of family-based
connections, buttressed by the expectations of inheritance and land rights; and
on the other hand, the rights and duties of governments and monarchs with
unchecked powers. That was the way that Europe had been governed for centuries,
but in a global economy, there also needed to be a space where merchants, legislators,
dissidents, or artists could thrive, and where individuals could seek meaningful
redress, and also have a voice that could be heard.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment bent their mind around
this conundrum, and in the decades that followed, the concept of civil society
took root. The need for such a space became urgent in part because of the difficulties
of managing the affairs of the ever-expanding British Empire. It was being challenged
by the yeastiness of American entrepreneurs and politicians, as well as the
special needs of Ireland, and the not totally unrelated needs of the slave
trade. In the absence of the buffers and protections of civil society, the best
option that the early international merchants had was to hire brothers,
cousins, uncles, or whoever else could carry on trade in remote regions and not
risk cheating them. After all: Distance was a strong solvent of trust.

Enter the invention of the coffee house. In 1650, an
entrepreneur known only as “Jacob” opened the first coffee house in Western Europe at the Angel Inn on High Street, Oxford. Its noveltie was multilayered. A wide range of classes were free here
to mingle and exchange ideas and information. Merchants absorbed the latest
gossip from sea captains; students threw off the yokes of the received wisdom
of their professors and intellectual
sociability replaced academic
discourse as the focus of many.

England was fertile ground for
germinating the seed of a new idea of civilization. The ground had been broken
and tilled by the Civil War; old habits and assumptions had been shaken. The
collapse of controls on printing and publication in the 1640s allowed a new
kind of contestatory print politics to emerge, particularly in the form of the
“mercuries”, regularly published newspapers.

The thinking that percolated in the early coffee houses was
not unlike that which centuries later would fuel many of the dissidents in
Eastern Europe - men such as Václav
Havel, Adam Michnik, and the poet Czesław Miłosz. In both instances, men acted as if they were free, and the longer
they did that, the as if started to
melt away, and new freedoms emerged. The early United Irishmen of the late
1700s were also part of this continuum. Although the freedom did not last, they
were initially free to think and act because of the space carved out a century earlier:

Dublin had a newspaper, the Dublin Newsletter, from 1685, through which Dunton [editor of the Athenian Mercury] could advertise his wares. He could conduct his book sale at Dick's in
Skinner's Row, circulate the catalog to coffeehouses in provincial cities like
Kilkenny and Cork to find buyers, and even conduct a pamphlet dispute with the
bookseller Patrick Campbell from the new vantage point of Patt's coffeehouse on
the High Street.

Much of what occurred at these coffee houses was practical,
not theoretical. One of them became a market for marine insurance. Why not? Asymmetrical
information is a well known recipe for exploitation, and coffee house gossip balanced
the stories put out by vested interests. By hearing about the latest crop
failures in America, shipwrecks in the West Indies, or the price of butter
being shipped from Cork, even the smaller merchants could minimize their risks.

Coffee house chat also went hand in glove with the political
and social changes that were in play by the end of the 1600s. One of the most effective weapons in William
of Orange’s arsenal was not the skills of his pike men, but the effects of his printed propaganda,
distributed through the mails and the coffee houses of England and Ireland.
By then, it was clear that the informal connections of the coffee shops had
begun to be co-opted by various kinds of power brokers, and had become a
necessary part of the toolkits of governments and Empires. At the same time, trade
and mercantile connections were becoming as valuable as title to land had once been.

As the 18th Century evolved, the coffee house
societies began to be supplanted by private clubs - a new social institution perfectly
adapted to the needs of the governing elite in the new British Empire. The atmosphere of such clubs is well known
to watchers of period dramas. Their private coffee rooms were “on a large scale, and fitted up in the style
of superior splendor to what is usually observed in our more fashionable
taverns”. Add in the ever-present
smoking rooms, as well as the libraries, and the Morning Room where men could
read newspapers and magazines in peace and quiet, and the ruling elite were now
well positioned to run the Empire as well as their own interests in the company
of like-minded and like-funded movers and shakers.

At this time, social power in Ireland, which had been mostly
based on land tenure, was shifting in ways that differed from the economic and
political changes in England. Ireland had no coal, or major industries, aside
from the linen trade. They had been bludgeoned in the Civil War in ways that
England had largely avoided, and as a result a much militarized countryside had
become polarized into opposing camps.

Civil society was supposed to
be the key that allowed Irish thinkers to understand the complexities of Irish
life in a more insightful and powerful manner and so to master them. The
surprise of violence in Ireland, particularly of scale, and the re-emergence of
old ethnic and sectarian forms of political allegiance confounded all
expectations and forced thinkers and practical politicians to reconsider the
most fundamental categories they used to explain and guide their experience.
The appeal to civil society, which was supposed to end conflict, instead was
found to drive it. Eventually all parties had to abandon the classic
interpretation of civil society as an understanding of the polity and embrace
new ideals.

This tragedy didn’t only hamstring legislators and citizens,
it also kneecapped traders. Merchants at the port at Cork may have exported
more beef than any other port in the world, and had organized markets for
supplying this beef, pork, and butter from the hinterland but they were
powerless when they came smack up against the economic interests of the Empire.
Catholics were the most disadvantaged. Irish
Protestants had no difficulty in negotiating complex identities. Their social
position as landowners integrated them into local societies governed by norms
of deference, influence, and privilege. These Irish Protestants, people
like my ancestors, even used theological precedents to buttress their case:

The biblical image of the
justified remnant, set apart amidst danger and providentially delivered, was a
powerful representation of the community. It was even capacious enough to be
extended to dissenters when the latter events of the Williamite wars demanded
interpretation. After the siege of Derry, dissenters could, if necessary, be
included within the central mythic narrative identity, while continuing to be
excluded from political representation by the Test Acts.

We might think that the equating of religious obligations
with commercial actions is a thing of the past, but then again, listen to much
of the language used in contemporary American politics. Plus
ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Then, just as now, the commercial
wolf becomes the religious lamb in the blink of an eye. My favourite example
from Civil Society is how the 1700s
subscribers to the Bank of Ireland were encouraged to invest:

If the universal consent of
all civilized nations in all ages has placed charity at the head of the moral
virtues; if Christ himself has given at the preference of all Christian as well
as moral virtues; let us then try whether erecting a bank here, that will take
no higher interest than 5%, will not be the most charitable undertaking that
private men can set about, or the Legislature enact into a law.

In writing this piece for my blog, I cannot do justice to
all the themes explored in Lindsey’s book. Even so, I should at least mention
the chapter on the Black family who lived in Co. Antrim, Co. Down, Co. Armagh, America, and Bordeaux.
Their story will be of interest to many of my readers. It also explains why so
many Irish traders used the Isle of Man as a smuggling base. The Irish
sensibilities and affiliations of the Blacks, and other such merchants, were
simultaneously an asset and a liability. They were both rooted, and rootless. One
of them, John Black - who died in 1767 – named his home Blamont after his earlier home in Bordeaux. He had it built at Ballintaggart,
Parish of Kilmore, Armagh. As I follow his story, I appreciate how his Presbyterian
Irish family ties enabled him to prevail in trade for as long as he did.

Stories such as this also leave me wanting to learn more.
For example, this John Black recalled: “After the break of Dromore the Irish were
coming sparing neither age nor sex putting all of the sword without mercy
myself carried in the dark night aboard my father ship”. The convergence of
faith and place makes me wonder if he might be connected to a much later
James Black (d. 1828) of Woodford, Dromara,
Co. Down. James was a chandler who married a niece of Thomas Ledlie Birch aka
Blubbering Birch, who was the famous or infamous United Irishman who was
deported for sedition. James’ son, Rev James Birch Black, served as a minister
at 1st Dromora until he was suspended for drunkenness, and died 5 months later
in 1823 leaving a widow and children. A connection here is likely.

All this aside, what matters even more than the particulars
of these Blacks, is that their story is one of those that shows us how the fortunes
of such Irish merchants rose and fell with the tides of the British Empire, and
how such outcomes challenged the thinkers of their time. Fortunately, we are the beneficiaries of their
radical thinking, and all because:

[They were]... hopeful that they could
describe the life of a modern commercial Empire in a way that would save the
local traditions of civility. In order to accommodate themselves to commercial
empire they were given to reconsider notions of moral excellence and identity,
even of fundamental theology, that had provided the common languages of moral
experience for hundreds of years. Their seemingly modest claims for the “common
life” or the everyday made them unfit for their old moral and political
habitats and drove them to seek to adapt the environment to fit their new
expectations. The consequences of that effort, its successes and failures,
still structure our ideas of civil society.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

NOTE: In the old deeds, Offally was named King’s Co. I am using the
old name in this piece because that is what is in the old records.

In like a lion, out
like a lamb. Or vice-versa. My blog in the month of March felt as if it was
more like in with the Broad-faced Potoroo
and out with the Galapogus Mouse. Both animals are now extinct, which
is what my blog felt like in the month of March. It was the first month since I
started a year and a half ago that I didn’t manage a single post. If you deduced
that my attention had been elsewhere, you would be right. It is also why this
post will be indecently long. For those who are not interested in this topic, the
Jacksons of Grange, Kings County, Ireland, it will also be infinitely boring.
For the rest of you, parts of it may be more riveting than the tradesmen’s work
done on the Titanic, which may not be saying much.

So why did I decide to interrupt this lengthy silence with a
piece on the Jacksons of Grange, Kings Co., Ireland? Good Question. It was
because I still can’t figure out if these Jacksons fit in with my Jacksons, or even whether that
matters to the outcome of my particular quest.

It did help that two brothers, Robert and Henry, got into a
legal slug fest over land, and left documentary traces of the whole kafuffle. After
this, it seems that Henry retreated east and set up a life for himself in Co.
Wicklow. This is not unusual. Jackson families did not stay within carefully
delineated County bounds. They popcorned all over the place, including as far
as America.

Now, when it comes to Kings Co. or anywhere else, just
because a number of Jacksons lived cheek by jowl doesn’t mean that they are
related. This caution, along with many others, is engraved on the inside of my forehead.
It is equally true that if a family lives consistently over time in the same
townland, this is nonetheless worthy of notice. The Jacksons of Kings County
are the latter. There were clusters in a number of parishes, and I had already
linked some of them in known trees. The links for these trees will be at the
bottom of this post.

I have also posted references to all the deeds that I have
found so far that mention Jacksons in Kings Co.. This adds up to about 8 pages
worth of references. Again, the link will be at the bottom of this post.

In order to take this
any further, it is definitely worth getting picky and naming the particular townland,
parish and barony where various Jacksons lived and/or held leases. Deeds and
wills and such often refer to a particular land designation one way, and then sometimes
another. To make things worse, the boundaries of counties, parishes and
townlands shifted over time. It is easy to make the mistake of looking in one
county, when you should be looking in a neighbouring one. I know it gets boring
when the string of place names gets too arcane, but it does help if you use the
ordnance survey map site to get yourself oriented.

Let me give an example. Recently, I finally made sense of one
of the Quaker Jacksons who emigrated to America. The Quaker records said that
he was a Thomas Jackson born in 1710 at Drechet,
Kings Co. So far, so good,
but I could not find Drechet for love nor money. A chance encounter with a
fellow researcher “Betty” pointed out that another record gave his birthplace
as Dreighet, Co. Kildare. A quick dip into the IreAtlas Townland database made it clear that this townland was probably Drehid,
Parish of Arkill, Barony of Carbury, Co. Kildare. It is in the north-easterly
part of Co. Kildare. A quick peek at the ordinance survey maps, and Bobs your uncle. This barony is on the
border of Kings Co., and Co. Kildare, and there are tons of Jacksons in the
surrounding parishes on both sides of the border.

It turned out that this particular Thomas wasn’t included in
the line of Quaker Jacksons that I had already assembled, because he was from
another line of Quaker Jacksons, even though he was living in the same part of
Ireland. Just to keep us on our toes, his line married with the ones I had already
posted in my original Quaker Jackson tree.

This new lot of Quaker Jacksons, that this Thomas of Drehid
belonged to, descended from Nicholas Jackson of Kilbank, Seawaite, Lancashire,
England. His son, Thomas, was also born at Seawaite, and married an Ann Man of
Mountmellick, Queens Co (aka Leix aka Laois). They had a son named, guess what
– Thomas – who was born in 1710 at the aforementioned Drechet aka Dreighet aka
Drehid. Pretty much every citing of his ancestry is based on the mention in the
appendix on page 285 of Proceedings ofthe Sesqui-centennial Gathering of the Descendants of Isaac and Ann Jackson.

With respect to all sorts of Jackson families in Kings Co., we
can see from the deeds that some of them farmed in the townland of Jonestown,
in the parish of Ballymacwilliam, Barony of Warrenstown; others were in the
townland of Ballychristal, Parish of Geashill, Barony of Upper Philipstown,
Kings Co.; while still others clustered at Edenderry, in the parish of
Monasteroris, Barony of Coolestown. In short, when it came to Kings Co., and
nearby counties, there were Jackson families here, there, and everywhere.

So far, I have not been able to link this latest batch to
any other group of Jacksons. They could be connected to the Quaker lot, or else
they could be a branch of the Ballyboy lot, or the Ballybritt lot, they could
be some other group all together. I would love it if someone out there actually
knows.

One aspect of their tree that makes me curious is the
marriage in 1785 between Robert Jackson and Mary Carroll. The Carroll name is a
significant name in Birr. Perhaps she was related to the famed Charles CARROLL(1661-1720) a wealthy Catholic settler in Maryland who in later life became
Attorney-General in Maryland.
His family came from Aghagurty, Parish
of Seirkieran, Barony of Ballybritt, Co. Offally. This is the same parish that
Birr is in, so it is not unlikely that there is a connection here.

It is also worth noting that when you are looking for the
townland of Birr, that it was also referred to as Parsonstown. This is not
because a parson lived there, but because of the family of Sir William Parsons
of Birr Castle (1731-1791). I have never been there, but from what I can see it
looks like a lovely place to visit, at least these days. Aspects of it may be
familiar to North American viewers of “Who Do You Think You Are?”. The
workhouse, a relict of a harsher time, was toured by Rosie O’Donnell because
the one from neighbouring Kildare which was connected to her family no longer
existed.

One of the other things that I am curious about with respect
to these Jacksons from Seirkieran, Kings Co. is why Arthur Tenison Groves spent
so much time documenting them. Perhaps someone had hired him to piece this tree
together. Maybe this post will find them. Groves was an antiquarian/genealogist
working in PRONI (Public Records Office of Ireland), and did do work for hire.
Thankfully, he had also a thing about making lists, and many of them were
completed before much of the public records of Ireland went up in flames in 1922.

I don’t claim to have found all of his mentions of Jacksons
noted under T808 in PRONI, but the ones that I transcribed after a recent
trip to Belfast add up to 16 pages of single page typing. The deeds references
have all been posted on my site. This gives some sense of the scope of this
resource, but I should also note that is only a tiny taste of one part of the
9,000 documents that Groves left us. It was thanks to him that I discovered the
details of the legal battle between the two brothers Robert and Henry.

Although Henry ended up in Co. Wicklow, some of this family seemed
to have remained in Seirkieran parish and elsewhere in Kings Co. for some time.
Decades later in Griffiths Valuation, there were still 207 mentions of Jacksons
in Kings Co., and 11 Jacksons were mentioned in the 1870 Landlords lists. All told,
they held leases to a few thousand acres. Not chump change when it comes to
land values.

I can’t claim to have run them all to ground, but I have at
least made a start. The deeds page that I assembled on Jacksons of Kings Co. will
overlap with many of those mentioned in Griffiths and the landlord records. Although
this quest is incomplete, I am hoping that it is helpful. Just let me know
where it takes you, so we can all learn together. Otherwise, enjoy, and as a
result of our sharing may fewer Jackson lines end up in the pile of endangered
species. No more Broad-faced Potoroo and Galapogus Mouse.

About Me

Author And Researcher. I am currently writing a book on the life of Sir Thomas Jackson. He was the son of tenant farmers, born just before the Famine in South Armagh, who was knighted because he not only lead HSBC into the 20th Century, but was also responsible for assisting with the funding of much of the economic development in China & Japan in the late 1800s. My first published book was "Some Become Flowers: Living with Dying at Home".